Reclaiming the Past: Nadia's Story

My Ukrainian grandparents Nadia and Petro Olijnyk arrived in Australia as post-war refugees in 1949. Petro died in 2005 and Nadia in 2009, each in their mid-90s. My grandfather loved telling stories and holding an audience. Nadia would sit with him, listening, but Petro would never allow her to take over. However, when he was not with her she would sometimes tell her own stories and I was struck by how different they were from his. This paper focuses not on Nadia's storytelling but her story writing, something she began to do in her late 80s for the first time in her life. Always a voracious reader (in Russian, Ukrainian and English), she also wrote fluently, mostly in English. Nadia wrote several hundreds of pages of notes, including many of her stories, in various notebooks-in the nursing home where she was immobile and totally bedridden for her last 10 years. Many people in the latter part of life communicate their early experiences through an unexplained feat of memory that brings back vivid details, but the motivation for Nadia to recall early experiences was much stronger than is usual. Her desire to recollect and to re-store her experiences was a kind of holding on to life, and claiming and asserting it as valuable and meaningful.